I won’t bore you with “The Math” because you already know it (or should, if you’ve been reading this blog) and it can’t really get worse when its been over for a while now.
Sanders’ consigliere, Jeff Weaver, went on MSNBC a little while ago to do his best Karl Rove impression, and to promise that Bernie will never concede even if his loss of the pledged delegate and popular vote contests becomes official. Instead, Weaver promised to head to Philadelphia with the intent of swaying the superdelegates over to his argument that only Bernie can beat Trump, or at least that he will beat him more decisively than Clinton could. We’ll have to see if Clinton even needs the superdelegates, but it’s obviously beyond doubtful that they would defect en masse to Sanders in that (or any other) situation.
I’ve encouraged Sanders to stay in the race and to get as many delegates as he can, and I’m not changing that position now. I don’t think he should do it half-ass, either, which means that he should aggressively make the case for himself.
But you shouldn’t listen when his campaign feeds you a line of magic, and you shouldn’t reward him if he’s clearly bullshitting you.
If you want the Democratic convention in Philadelphia to have as many Sanders supporters as possible, then vote for him. Just know that the goal here is to have a lot of progressive influence at the convention and to get a lot of progressives some experience working within the power structure of the Democratic Party. The goal is not to win the nomination anymore, but that doesn’t mean the fight should be over.
It troubles me that so many progressives got their hopes up and are now feeling despondent or worse. But the issues that got people excited about Bernie aren’t going away and the battle within the party goes on. If you let this be about one man, you’re were missing the big picture. This year’s delegates will have real influence, and they’ll be veterans four years from now. They’ll be in a position to change how the nomination process works. They’ll attain positions of local power. Some of them will become elected officials.
Sanders has some decisions to make, but his movement will live on with or without him. He can probably maximize their influence by carrying on, but he can also bring dishonor and disrepute on his supporters if he isn’t smart about his approach. I really hope we don’t see signs of petulance, and I don’t want to see him pumping delusions and bitterness into his followers. I think, and hope, he can conduct himself in a positive way and be pleased with what he’s accomplished, which has been more than he probably expected to accomplish.
He tried his best to win in New York, which is what his supporters deserved, but he came up short and it’s well and truly over now. All that’s left is to carry the torch to the convention and realize the fruits of his labors, which can and should be considerable.
To do that would be to betray the cause.
nice.
the supporters earned that.
Nothing like a little condescension, BooMan, I really appreciate it.
Booman was being ironic.
I usually keep my snarcometer in pretty good adjustment, but I hope you’re right.
When he said “the supporters earned that”, I thought he meant they deserved Davis’s snide remark. It was the “Nice” that led me to that interpretation.
But if the “Nice” was sarcastic and he meant that Bernie’s supporters earned some influence in the party through the delegates they elected (which was, after all, his point in the post), then I misread him and you’re right.
And I hope he’s right, too, though at the moment I’m not feeling too optimistic.
You know, I can see some of the same “success means betrayal” rigamarole in the comment threads here, but maybe we ought to be gracious and accepting instead of snarky and dismissive.
Well, that would certainly highlight some contrasts, wouldn’t it?
>>maybe we ought to be gracious and accepting instead of snarky and dismissive
that’s not Davis’s style. He only does snarky and dismissive.
Well said. The writing is on the wall. The fat lady is warming up!! Clearly Jeff Weaver is quite delusional if he thinks he is going to get any Hillary superdelegates to switch over to Bernie. As for Sanders, he can do what he wants to do, stay in, get out, it makes no difference. The race against Trump starts now!!
Weaver better be delusional. All Sanders and his supporters have done for months is ‘democracy, democracy, democracy’ and now Weaver is saying ‘most delegates does not matter, most votes do not matter, just disenfranchise the majority’. How does that jive with the over all Sanders message?
Unfortunately I believe Sanders agrees with this. I believe Sanders and Weaver are on the same page.
I hope I am wrong.
.
I hope Team Sanders is capable of turning the page and getting on board with a Democratic Team message.
If you mean ‘dictating the Democratic message’, sounds like a plan! After all he’s been doing that from the start.
He should stay in. But he should probably ease off on directly taking on Clinton. And he certainly needs to stop the ‘southern states should not count’ bs.
But I doubt he will tone it down. He’s simply not the right person to lead this.
.
His concession speech left me with that impression too. Way too much wining about the unfairness of it all. He began the race in a much more conciliatory place, unwilling at the time to speak negatively about Clinton. Now he exudes a sense of frustration bordering on entitlement. I want to say, “Hey dude, you did really well, better than even you expected. I get the disappointment but you gotta deal with reality. You lost fair and square. Now let’s shake hands and move on.”
I don’t think he has it in him. Like Obama, people projected their own desired characteristics on him. But one thing we found out, he’s not the man Obama is.
It’s not good enough to have political positions. You have to have the character to get people to help you implement them, to work for your goals. You would think a career politician like Sanders would have that, but apparently not. Maybe that is why he does not resonate with POC? There’re ‘radar’ is better than many.
.
Why? I think he should keep going after Clinton until the end. As far as the southern states issue; has he really been saying this? I have heard this floating around, but not from him.
I hope he doesn’t; actually if he does he may lose some supporters.
He’s not the right person to lead what?
And people like yourself wonder why so many Sanders supporters are hostile and angry…
“Sanders’ consigliere,”
Oh fergawdsakes, Booman, projecting much?
jesus, shall I call a wahmbulance for you?
No but calling one of the Democratic candidate a crime boss is kinda out of line.
Fine I get it you’re all in for Hillary. That doesn’t make Sanders the enemy, just the opponent.
I know you want Sanders to drop out so Hillary can be anointed the candidate, but why? What would be so wrong with him hanging on until the convention whether or not it’s impossible for him to win?
What’s with the enormous need to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women?
Save it for the opponents who it truly matters we beat that badly…
No, BooMan is totally for Sanders. Can’t you tell?
Read BooMan’s post again.
At least acknowledge his stated position, which is substantially different than the one you claim for him here. You may wish to disbelieve him, which would be an odd expenditure of energy, but bounding through with claims about BooMan which are directly contradicted by his writing seems to burn up credibility pretty quickly.
Reading.
How does it work?
A consigliere is not a crime boss. It’s a lawyer.
And the rest of your comment is just silly. I get that Sanders had a bad night, but the invective you’re lobbing at Booman is just inaccurate.
I agree, Booman. If he continues the course of the past few days/weeks, he risks losing the influence he can wield prior to and at the convention. He could shape the platform, give a keynote speech, even effectively move the VP choice. Why throw that away?
He will not be allowed to influence the platform, he will not be allowed to make a keynote speech, he will become a nonperson at the Philadelphia convention…unless he can be nominated at the convention and the delegates can vote on him. That way about 40 percent of the Democratic primary voters will also be represented at the convention and the true duplicitous face of the Democratic Party be put on display, opened to scrutiny at a pivotal moment. I don’t know if he can be nominated if Clinton already has the outright majority of the pledged delegates. Anyway it is nonsense to think that Bernie Sanders will be welcome at Philadelphia no matter how he plays he card. He’ll need to push his way in. Don’t worry about the Clintons. They’ll huff and puff but secretly understand his stance completely because it has always been their’s. How did Hillary Clinton ever, ever get to be Senator from NY and Secretary of State. Oh, I’d be thrilled to hear about the inside machinations of those to political appointments.
Agreed.
Personally this thing has me feeling energized. The entire party attacked us, we had almost no one in our cirner, scaremongering thst I didnt even see in 2008, and the Clintons used all the backroom muscle and money and influence they had. And we still got about 40%. And large numbers under 45 are with us.
You may win this year, but centrists your time is ending. You’re not in your graves yet, but we can see those graves from here. In other words, we’re coming for YOU.
I hope you are right but we are almost out of time. Things in this country, and on this planet, are moving too fast. If we have eight more years of what we had under Obama, the generation after us will live in a radically different world. And not in a good way.
I fear when the centrists will be in their graves, we will be as well.
Entirely possible in fact I agree, but I decided that I want to go out fighting for that future generation.
I salute you, Sir!
If we’re almost out of time with Hillary in the White House, imagine the disaster with Trump or Cruz or any of the other Rs in the White House. One has to admit that’s a much scarier thought.
To be honest I’m not sure it is.
At any rate, the sooner mankind is gone from the Earth, or reduced to smaller numbers, the better. I don’t think we have the right to take down all the other life forms on this planet due to our greed and stupidity. At the current rate we are looking at severe greenhouse events in the next few decades, and most likely a full runaway greenhouse scenario in about 100-200 years. When that happens, Earth turns into Venus and everything dies. If humans have to go away to prevent that, I’m perfectly okay with that.
Not possible until the sun turns most of the hydrogen into helium, and then begins to expand. We currently do not get and retain enough energy from the Sun to create an atmosphere that is 96% carbon dioxide, given the fact our is 78% nitrogen.
Also even though temps on Venus have been recorded as high as 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F), part of this is due to the very long duration rotation period (245 days), and since its solar orbit is 224.7 Earth days, it means that the same point on the planet stares at the sun for over one Venetian year.
Also temperatures at the poles have been recently measured an average temperature of -157 degrees Celsius. So the entire planet is not a hot house.
http://gizmodo.com/we-just-learned-something-crazy-about-the-atmosphere-of-1771796546
Nice sound bite you posted, just not scientifically accurate. And given the very real dangers posed by AGW and the effects for the future of the planet and higher forms of life on it, posting very inaccurate claims which are debunked very easily doesn’t help.
Bernie probably couldn’t have done very much to change the ships course,
Hillary probably won’t try very hard, would inconvenience all those third way DLC/DNC types she is beholden to.
However which ever clueless -politico the GOtPers come up with well they will just double down on the dumb with respect to the coming catastrophe, just like Ronnie Ray-gun did.
So in the end if Bernie has been mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination, Hillary is the least worst choice left. Best I can say about her.
Cite please? The last time I checked the Earth, with enough greenhouses gasses could create a Venus like environment, without any additional help from the Sun. If you have a link to something that states this is not a possibility I will gladly concede the point. And while I have seen studies a few years ago that did claim it wasn’t possible via human activity, there has been new research that questions this premise.
The facts you posted about Venus don’t change the main issue that life is not possible there. If you notice, I didn’t make any claims about specific temperatures in what regions; I merely stated that life is not possible. At least not the kind of live that exists on Earth. So these facts really don’t address the issue.
An equally nice sound bite. If it so easily debunked please provide a source. I’m willing to admit that I’m wrong, but not just because you say so.
No, but I think Sanders would at least try. I have no faith Clinton will do anything, and to be honest I think she is no better than the GOP when it comes to the environment. So in my mind it’s over. We had a small chance, now we have no chance. I won’t be here to see it, but I feel bad for people who have children. And I feel worse for the animals that we will drag down with us.
I was only questioning the statement Earth into Venus, we cannot sustain enough green house gases, because of the fact we have a magnetic core while Venus doesn’t. This affected how the planet wasn’t able to retain water. Water is very useful for heat transfer in the atmosphere and storage in the oceans, something Venus have none of.
The question of life is a little more uncertain.
Life on planet earth exists in many strange places, at the depths of the oceans, even at the very hot vents along the ocean ridges.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast13apr_1/
They have also found life 2,400m beneath the seabed off Japan.
http://www.zmescience.com/research/discoveries/deepest-marine-drill-finds-life-0423432/
Those are both examples of “life” that wouldn’t be directly affected by the changes we make in the biosphere.
The question of life is a little more uncertain.
Complex life like primates, probably not if we go above 6C pre industrial, with massive die off at even half that level.
Other mammals probably would precede humans into extinction, because when regular food sources decline dues the severe problems with modern day industrial agriculture we rely on, every possible wild food source will be exhausted in the dire need of starving people to feed themselves and families.
Oceans will be stripped as much as possible for what ever edible calories exist.
Yes we can and probably will push this to the extreme, but some forms of life are off limits top us to exploit or even affect very much..
Start mixing and distributing the koolaid.
I like your attitude. Good that you’re in MN, where the experience was a bit different. Me, I’m from NYC.
I didn’t expect Sanders to win. I did expect him to do better than he did. But in any case, the election in NYC was badly fucked up. Among other irregularities, over 125,000 eligible voters were stricken from the rolls in my home town of Brooklyn. We don’t know who they were going to vote for, that’s not even the point.
The spread in Brooklyn came to 20 points. Only in Rockland (21) Nassau (25.2), New York County Manhattan 32.6), Westchester (35) and the Bronx (40) was it bigger.
You know what’s interesting? Manhattan and Westchester are per capita the wealthiest counties in the state, and the Bronx is the poorest.
I was really on fire for Dean, but saw him crushed like a bug before Iowa. So the difference compared to the last campaign I was really excited by is huge.
Yeah, I was too. That was awful, what happened with him.
Oh, I left out the borough of Queens (23.2).
So actually, compared to the other boroughs of NYC, Brooklyn came in second best for Sanders (she won Staten Island by only 4.8). I can take a little consolation in that.
In the NYC vicinity, she won Orange County by 3, Suffolk by 9.4. Other counties she won: Erie (Buffalo) by 0.4; Monroe (Rochester) by 3.6; and Onondaga (Syracuse) by 6; Bernie won every other county in the state.
Brooklyn was HRC’s worst borough in ’08; she won 50 to 48%. In ’08 she won Staten Island by 25%, but we know what that was about.
Smugness is not your best look BooMan.
I find it hilarious with everything you have said up to this point that you think the DNC convention will, in any meaningful way, allow Sanders to “realize the fruits of his labors”. They will put on a show of supporting his goals and ideals, but only to try and repair the damage they have done with young and independent voters.
I don’t know how long you’ve been in Washington D.C., but clearly its been too long.
I have to agree with all your points.
There’s nothing smug about speaking truthfully. I think you’re projecting. He’s saying Sanders has every right to stay in and should just be careful about the tone he sets. Ultimately the Democratic party is our team. That includes all of us. Only in a dictatorship is there a possibility of not having to compromise. I’m as liberal as the next guy but I’m old enough and have been around the block enough times to get that progress is something that occurs over generations.
You’re missing the point of the comment. I’m not supposed to be smug because I tell the truth, I am supposed to be smug because what I said would happen is what happened.
So, even if I don’t take any pleasure in seeing Sanders flame out, if I point out that it doesn’t really matter because he’d lost already anyway, then I am being smug.
Why? Because I told you he’d lost already a long time ago.
But real smugness would be me mocking Sanders and his supporters and demanding they shut up and get in line, which is not what I’ve done or am doing.
The only way you could accuse me of the former is by pointing at my analysis of why Sanders lost and calling that mockery. That’s not a fair characterization, as the strongest thing I’ve said was that he got started too late and didn’t have a good strategy.
As to his supporters, I have avoided saying negative things about them even when some of them have annoyed the fuck out of me by being as reality-challenged as any Tea Bagger. They’ve almost annoyed me enough to get me to vote for Clinton, but that’s not how I ultimately make my decisions. It’s not about what some jackass said on Twitter. I’m a progressive, and that’s how I’ll vote.
So, I guess I’ve been mocking myself this whole time.
I can relate. I wound up voting for Sanders at the Washington caucuses despite misgivings but was able to ask questions of both sides that hopefully got people thinking more deeply. Since lots of folks asked me to be a delegate to the next level caucus, I know I at least impressed them with knowledge. Ultimately, though, I had better things to do than to become a Sanders delegate on my first day back from vacation.
On the other hand, if I could have kept it going two more rounds, I would have been in position to go to D.C. I don’t know how likely that would have been because, with each round, the support probably firms up. The Sanders campaign may have already had their favorites in place for the latter rounds. On the other hand, as unorganized is the campaign has been, and with so little establishment support, who knows. Washington’s one of the states that’s ultimately going to send a slew of Sanders delegates.
Alas, there’s a way in which I would have felt myself a fraud had I been a Sanders delegate at any subsequent round because I’m anything but a true believer. I see Bernie as a seriously flawed idealist. I would personally love to see his kind of government in place, and would happily submit to higher taxes and the like, but I know I’m a statistical outlier and have real questions as to his ability to win a general election, even against a Trump or a Cruz.
I get what you’re saying.
You would have been sent to my neck of the woods, though, not D.C.
Are you really going to claim you EVER saw Bernie getting to dead even nationally.
You consistently underestimated Bernie.
Anyone with a brain could do the math and no it was a long shot. Why people see that as some sort of persience is beyond me.
Check your petulance, fladem.
Getting even in the national polls and a nickel will buy you what, exactly?
Prescience is the ability to see not only what will happen but why it will happen.
What I could see is that Clinton was immensely popular with progressives in her post-SoS period during the bulk of Obama’s second term.
It surprised me initially, and I tried to challenge it every way I could think of, but the rock wouldn’t budge.
That’s when I became despondent and depressed and realized that there would be no successful challenge from her left this time around.
That doesn’t mean that I couldn’t see the enormous thirst for that challenge. I spend all day in the blogosphere. I knew how much committed liberals wanted someone at least where Obama is, if not substantially further to the left.
Unfortunately, I realized that their hopes would amount to nothing because they were a small minority even in their own tribe.
A different candidate with natural appeal to people of color who got started very early and worked very hard to win over at least some institutional support might have had a chance. Sanders wasn’t the right person, he didn’t get organized early enough, and he didn’t have the right strategy. But he did great, despite these shortcomings because he’s a pretty damn good politician and the thirst is real and growing.
If you think I didn’t want a serious, viable challenge from the left, you’re dead wrong. I spent a few months in 2014 in a complete funk over this, and it almost caused me to quit blogging altogether because I wasn’t sure I could carry on without a cause to support.
But I also wasn’t going to spend two years deluding myself and my readers into believing that Clinton could be denied this nomination.
It was never in the cards, and it’s precisely because of results like you see from The Bronx last night.
. . . last night.”
Are you referring to the reported voter-roll purge, just the returns, or something else?
And I thought I was Mr. Negative. I think I’ve had more than enough of your type of Sanders supporter.
But then again, this assumes you are being honest when you claim to be a Sanders supporter. If I accept that you have been less than honest on this matter, much of what you post makes sense.
Oh, you mean “The Bronx” that may have had massive numbers of illegal voters purged from the primary rolls? Yes, let’s use that as an example. An area that may have the worst case of voter disenfranchisement in all of New York state. Sometimes I don’t think you give any thought to what you type.
Two things. It wasn’t the Bronx, it was Brooklyn. Second, I don’t understand what you’re saying about it.
There is a difference, BTW. Clinton’s margin of victory in the Bronx was exactly TWICE that of what it was in Brooklyn. As Marie commented yesterday, Brooklyn (i.e. Kings County) is (except for Staten Island, which has always had completely different voting patterns than the rest of the city) the county of NYC in which Hillary is the least popular. It also has the largest population of the five boroughs.
Now, I don’t know what happened to those 60,000+ voters or why. But we need to know. It’s being investigated, and I hope the investigation is fair and thorough.
I don’t think it is “our team” anymore, priscianus jr. It most certainly is not my team, and hasn’t been at least since Gore and the rest of the Dem establishment basically caved in to the theft of the presidency by the Bush II campaign in 2000.
It apparently is no longer the team of a great number of Sanders supporters, either. Whether they have realized this fact yet or not, when the “healing” clownshow is performed at the convention it will become obvious to many of them what is really up. Once again a progressive candidate has been beaten by a member in good standing of the Permanent Government with the almost total collusion of the mass media, and the same damned thing will happen in 2020. Bet on it.
This is not a generational thing, nor is it a demographics thing. It’s a power thing, and the Democratic Party machine is totally in bed with the .01%. Only the founding of a new party that is dedicated to public funding rather than corporate ownership will change this state of affairs, and so far I do not see the slightest hint of such a thing happening on any level that would be able to mount a good fight in 2020. I would be delighted to hear Sanders get up in front of the convention and essentially say “OK motherfuckers, I’ve had it with this shit. I tried to warn you and you didn’t listen. We’re taking our bat, our ball and our gloves and we’re going to go build a a new field. Best of luck in the future. You’re gonna need it. Build it and they will come. Buh-bye, bubbelehs!!!”
But of course…he won’t.
So here we are, stuck with Hillary Clinton.
Running against whom?
Aye…there’s the rub!
The safesayers think HRC will beat whomever the RatPubs nominate, but I’m not so sure. I think Trump…even with the almost unanimous opposition that will be mounted against him by the centrist media machine…will be able to clean her clock in a head-to-head battle. Her only hope is that the dummies in the RNC successfully do their Rat thing, bump Trump and put some tomato can up against her.
Stay tuned.
It’s gonna get even more interesting soon.
Watch.
AG
Glad that Trump won. At least the Republicans in New York are fed up with Wall Street suck ups, even if Democrats voted for more corruption and more assaults on working people.
Who’d a thunk it?
You’re outlook is particularly bleak, Arthur. In fact, of all the pessimists around these parts, you stand out as bleakest of ’em all. I respect your right to your opinion but thankfully do not share it because I can’t imagine how hard it would be to wake up each morning.
My perspective is that we’ve always had problems and always will. If I look back over time with a degree of attempted objectivity, the further back I look the worse the problems are. I’m generalizing — there are ups and downs along the way. But consider life in 1916, 100 years ago, on the eve of an insane mechanized war that would kill countless young men for no reason and subvert European culture. There was also an imminent flu epidemic that would kill even more. Racism and sexism were scourges; women didn’t have the right to vote and blacks effectively lived in a state of terror. LGBT wasn’t yet even a concept — people thought more in terms of crimes against nature. There was still child labor. The list of horrors goes on and on.
Now let’s move forward to 50 years ago. In 1966, the U.S. was in an intractable conflict in Vietnam for apparently no reason. 50,000 American soldiers would die for the cause and countless Vietnamese. Cambodia would be culturally shredded leading to genocide. Our country seemed on the brink of coming apart at the seams and we were still smack dab in the middle of a terrifying cold war. Children lived in fear of nuclear annihilation. But much had improved. There was no longer child labor. Civil rights legislation had recently been passed. Women not only had the vote but there was a women’s rights movement. Family planning was in place, freeing them from social expectations to bear children and they were gaining access to the work force. Social Security and Medicare were in place. There was a thriving middle class (more so than today in fact). Immunization had ended the terrible scourge of childhood disease and death.
Today the cold war has ended. We recently had a war similar to Vietnam but there was no draft and, terrible as it was, it wasn’t as vast or horrid. Women are the top students at most universities and outnumber men in many graduate and professional programs, often with the highest grades and test scores. We have an African-American president in the White House. The ACA has made health care accessible to many who were previously SOL. By no means is everything perfect, but we’ve made progress. Under President Obama, despite unprecedented opposition, we’ve continued to make progress over his full 7+ years in office. And we’re watching demographic shifts that should ultimately lead to a more open and just society.
We’ll probably never get to a place where everything’s perfect. As some things improve, others worsen and new issues arise. But the further one looks back in history, the more unjust and brutal life was. I don’t see a Hillary Clinton election as the end of the line. Progress will continue.
i wake up very easily, thank you.
It’s going to sleep that’s the problem.
You obviously don’t have any problem with that.
You write:
A quick translation into this century’s terms:
Wake the fuck up.
AG
I might add…in 1966 pop culture was singing about peace, light and change. Today it’s singing about offing cops and fucking bitches.
Nice, Parallax.
We jes’ fine, now!!!
WTFU.
AG
Arthur Gilroy, arbiter of popular culture. His summaries of both 1966 and 2016 popular culture are way off.
I don’t need “these kids today” to get off my lawn; it seems painful to choose to believe as he does here.
“[My] summaries of both 1966 and 2016 popular culture are way off,” eh?
Way off?
Show me.
And “Kids offa the lawn???!!!” I am one of those kids. Bet on it. I was one of them in the’ 60s and I got lucky. I found a way to live young and creative no matter what my age.
You?
You work for the DNC, right?
Get those old, tired motherfuckers offa my lawn, please, and take yourself off with them. If I had a lawn, of course. Which I don’t. I got NYC instead. A good trade, overall.
Over and out.
You must have a lot of work to do, what with carrying Hillary’s massive baggage and all. Better get busy. November’s only about 6 months away and Trump is already seriously looking at how to clean her clock. You know…the one that stopped in the 1990s?
Watch.
AG
I don’t work for the DNC; no idea where you got that, other than that you believe fervently what you want to believe, facts be damned. Man, reading is FUNdamental.
You just keep on believing the Myth of the Unstoppable Trump In November, again, facts be damned.
Did you not recently claim that you were some sort of functionary in your state’s Democratic Party? I remember commenting on it then, although I do not have the time to diddle around trying to find it because I find you enough of a waste of time as it is.
I was happy when you wrote that you were not going to be here anymore, and disappointed when that turned to be untrue.
So it goes.
AG
Since we both support Bernie, I’ve come to realize that we’re more alike than different. BTW, I’m also from the 60s, I’m also a musician, and also a father.
I realize that’s the common belief (constrained by a view of “history” compiled completely from within our globally dominant culture), but considerable evidence says otherwise.
I first came across Sahlins’ (link above) argument via a reference in one of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael trilogy (whose account of “how things came to be this way” I have found very compelling, accurate where it overlaps with my areas of professional expertise [ecology], and thus a major influence on my worldview).
Including that the famous characterization that our human ancestors’ lives were “nasty, brutish, and short” (i.e., those humans who pre-dated or coexisted outside the dominion — while that remained possible — of our cultural ancestors once their Totalitarian Agricultural Revolution was launched ~10,000 years ago).
You can follow the wiki links to the credible conclusion that “hunter-gatherer tribes are able to meet their needs through working roughly 15-20 hours per week or less” (leaving the rest available for “leisure” including the arts), which is why Sahlins call them “the original affluent society”.
Preempting anticipated (because recently received) objection: this is not a proposal that humanity return to hunter-gatherer subsistence. Among many other reasons this is obviously not feasible: agricultural surpluses have fueled massive human population growth — while the vast majority of us have simultaneously lost the knowledge/wisdom to fend for ourselves in nature — to the point that this would entail starvation of (guessing here) a large majority of the current global human population.
Rather, it’s a suggestion that getting off the immensely destructive (including, but not limited to, self-destructive) path that we are on will take a critical mass of “changed minds” about things like how to live and what’s worth (and not worth) living for.
Yes, that’s a tall order, especially in the time plausibly left to save us from ourselves. No, I don’t think it’s likely. Which is why I’m a pretty persistent pessimist (or actually, from my perspective, just a realist).
But an important element of a start in that direction would be refuting/rejecting the notion you stated, i.e., that “…the further one looks back in history, the more unjust and brutal life was.” That’s true only if we accept a definition (which IS commonly accepted, but wrongly) of “history” as limited to the record of our dominant culture by our dominant culture, excluding and disappearing the experience of the many thousands of alternative cultures that have existed (a tiny handful of which still manage to persist even in the face of “our” “best” efforts). Which is a very false picture of actual human history, which extends a couple million years before the “history” of our culture. (Quite a few gaps have already been filled in by anthropology, paleontology, and ecology to demonstrate that this is so.)
Nice to see that reference. The key was freedom to migrate. When humans were locked in place, debt peonage became possible.
Interesting you put it that way. The Quinn/Ishmael premise is that “the key” (pretty literally!) was the core innovation by the originators of the Totalitarian Agricultural Revolution: i.e., they “locked up the food”. Which then enabled them to dictate that if you don’t work (including in the time, manner, and at the task that we demand), you don’t eat. Which remains at its core the central principle of “our” current economic system. (For hunter-gatherer cultures, in contrast, “the whole world is food”.) It also enabled production of massive food surpluses which fueled explosive human population growth with all its disastrous ecological consequences, while simultaneously producing dependency of the entire population on those locked-up food supplies/surpluses. And was pursued not via the competition normal in ecology (which fuels evolution), but instead through waging all-out war on anything and everything that competes with us for food (hence the “totalitarian” in Totalitarian Agricultural Revolution).
For hunting-gathering specifically, freedom to migrate is indeed an important element: intensive foraging in a limited area will eventually reduce your available food sources there, but that’s not a problem so long as you can then move along to another area where they remain abundant.
It’s important to note, though, that subsistence hunting-gathering was not the only quite successful cultural innovation that “our” now-dominant culture has been systematically exterminating over millennia now. There’s plenty of evidence that other non-“us” cultures engaged in various forms and levels of experimentation with settlement and agriculture, too.
Ecology, eh? My son is a PhD student in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell right now. “Ecological biology” is how he references it.
I knew I liked you…
What you people are trying to do is the most important scientific endeavor in perhaps all of history. You fail, we die as a species. What a lot of good work gone to waste that would be!!!
Keep on keepin’ on…
AG
Did I say he was being smug?
My reply below was for this comment. Sorry.
AG
Above, not below. Duh.
AG
I don’t see a distinction between that, and ‘putting on a show of rightwingism to impress crossover Republican voters’.
If the Clinton people put on a show of progressivism to pander to progressives, I will straight up rejoice. When Clinton panders, she follows through: ask Wall Street. Right now I want to see the progressive movement documented specifically so she will choose to pander to us, because it’s important.
Proverbs 5:3 to 5:11
Booman lives in Philadelphia.
Don’t stop him. He’s on a roll.
Wow…the longer this primary goes on the more petty you become.
So? I didn’t say he lived in Washington D.C., but it is clear from his previous comments who he works for. Or do you think that most beltway insiders live in Washington D.C.?
Why do you come to the blog of someone you obviously don’t respect? There are plenty of other sites. Is it necessary for you to come here and insult your host?
Must be a real hit at parties, eh? Dropping turds on every host’s living room carpet.
Ah, yes. The tone police. Also fun at parties.
At times I do respect BooMan, other times not. It’s not an all or nothing proposition.
If the host has no issues in insulting his guests, then I have no issue in insulting him. If that bothers you, there are plenty of other sites.
Maybe you’ll be willing to do me a favor if I ask nicely.
Ask around, you know, the other commenters here, and see how many times they can remember me being as rude to anyone as I’ve been to you.
There are a couple of people here with whom I have spirited disagreements, but they’re well informed and well-meaning, and they give as good as they get.
There’s a reason this place is civil and has a reputation for being civil, and you don’t get that. You don’t respect it.
Usually, the community is very successful in easing people into the culture, so it’s not uncommon for new users to come in from other forums where its more rough and tumble, and then to ruffle some feathers with their aggressiveness. Most of the time, they settle in and add something of value.
With you, it doesn’t seem to be working, and that has me concerned.
BooMan, I appreciate your question. I think, if I’m honest, I don’t need to ask as I feel that the answer would be along the lines of never or very, very rarely.
Yes, I often see those discussions; between you, and between other posters. I do understand your point, I think the problem I am having is seeing how these discussions are always civil. I will agree that on the whole things are very civil here and I do appreciate and get that. Where I get confused is when things get uncivil, which they do from time to time.
While I know this may come off as defensive, it’s not meant to. I have a hard time understanding your issue with me when others appear just as uncivil as I have been. This is not meant as an excuse for me being uncivil, but it is why I am confused. Is there an aspect of my rudeness that is different from others? This is not meant as a confrontational question but one that will help me understand how my uncivil behavior is, for lack of a better word, “worse” than what sometimes happens here.
I hope you take this as a honest response, and I look forward to a better understanding of how to contribute here but also allow for spirited debate.
Thank you.
Who knew that NYC is like SC?
If we’re to be fair to Bernie, he did better in NY than Obama did in ’08. He won more than forty counties and Obama won just one. We could also add in that unaffiliated voters had to change their party registration several weeks before the first DEM debate; whereas, in ’08 voters saw a dozen debates before the registration change deadline. (And no the Sanders’ campaign wasn’t asleep at the switch on the registration change, but voters hadn’t bothered to tune in to the primary that early.)
Bernie does well in communities and with voters that were hurt by the financial meltdown and weren’t bailed out. Good thing NYC is wealthy enough to manage sea level rise all on its own.
“He won more than forty counties and Obama won just one.”
Wow. I guess he got 40 times the vote Obama did, huh? And here I thought that Sanders got 42.1% and Obama got 40.3%.
Wouldnt that translate into more CDs and thus greater delegate haul?
Reading comprehension. Had I made those two statements within one sentence, you could bitch, but I didn’t because they focused on two different aspects of the NY election results. He did do better, albeit slightly, on his popular vote total. He also did much better than Obama in many small non-urban counties.
” I guess he got 40 times the vote Obama did, huh?”
Uh, no, she neither said nor implied that. She said Sanders won 40 counties and Obama won just one. Which is true.
It means that Sanders has more rural support than Obama did. We knew that already
Well, I was curious about the breakdown in a big blue state. There has been ample time for Sander’s message to get around. So, disappointing.
It did get around, that’s why he won 40 counties.
Looking over the map, NYC and a few neighboring counties is pretty much the whole story of the big defeat. Once you get beyond there, even the few counties he lost, he didn’t lose by much.
Yeah, but in a general, he would have a harder time in those counties against a Republican, no?
It depends on the particular county, but I think most of them would go for Bernie. You’d have to do a detailed analysis to be sure. No doubt you’re right for some, but probably not as many as you might think. It also would probably matter who the R candidate actually was.
In both 2006 and 2012, only 26 of New York’s 62 counties went Republican. But, for example, there are five urban-area upstate counties that are reliably Democratic – Erie (Buffalo), Monroe (Rochester), Onondaga (Syracuse), Tomkins (Ithaca) and Albany. Sanders just won the last two, but lost only narrowly in the others, and in the general he’d win all five. And there are also numerous rural counties that voted D in both of the last federal elections and they ALL went for Bernie today. Then, of course, New York City and neighboring counties are Democratic and would go for Bernie in the general. Of counties near NYC, Putnam, Nassau and Suffolk MIGHT not.
Probably not if primary voter turnout is a guide. More DEM than GOP votes in a few of the counties that I checked.
Did note that GOP turnout was very high compared to the last two election cycles. In 2000 — GWB only received 380,000 votes and McCain got 330,000 that year and in 2008. So, at 520,000 Trump might have set a record.
Correction — in yesterday’s primary Sanders won 49 counties, not 40. Hillary won 13.
Way to sell that lemon. 49 counties for Bernie! 13 for Clinton. Why if you didn’t know any better you’d think counties mattered worth a damn.
But they don’t, because to my disbelief, Hillary Clinton spanked Bernie Sanders by 16% points of the total vote 58%-42% Clinton over Sanders.
I honestly expected Sanders to win New York, or at least not get beat by double digit percentage. But then again I deliberately checked out of reading the polls 2 weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Still been paying attention to the issues and candidates, but avoiding the polls like the plague.
I think we’re all well aware that he lost the NY primary.
The demographic data has all kinds of meaning as to why he lost it, which obviously doesn’t interest you.
I’ll just give you the most obvious point. He lost NY because of New York City and vicinity, combined with the state’s restrictive voting laws. He won the rest of the state, because even in the few upstate counties that he lost, it wasn’t by much.
I also support Bernie. I didn’t expect him to win. I did think he would do a lot better than he did. But that was based on stuff that (if true) probably wouldn’t have shown up in the polls anyway — new voters, youth vote, that sort of thing. He had a great ground game, but as it turns out, the odds were impossible.
I also have a deep personal interest in it, because I am a NY voter myself and I grew up in the same neighborhood as Bernie. He was slaughtered in his own f-ing precinct. It was a lot different place when we were coming up.
Well, let’s not forget that he only lost because SOUTHERN New York voted for Clinton.
And you know what that means. ::wink wink::
.
On the other side I’ve seen a LOT of argument that it’s the right message but wrong messenger: that Bernie’s platform is solid but best implemented by Clinton.
I don’t think this is in any way a repudiation of Bernie’s message. A lot of people decided for good or ill that they wanted Clinton to make it happen, not Bernie.
What a crock of shit! Clinton couldn’t implement Bernie’s agenda even if she wanted to! And she doesn’t want to or she wouldn’t have collected MILLIONS from our deepest enemies, including personal millions in bribes.
That’s exactly what I was going to say. But on the other hand, it’s perfectly possible that a lot of people gulled themselves into believing it.
Er, Sanders is really not into market solutions for social problems. That is how they got to be social problems in the first place–inserting the market into social goods.
You ain’t wrong about that.
Yes, that would certainly explain his losses in Florida, Nevada and Arizona, as well as his win in Michigan.
And the 70-30 shellacking he took last night in the Bronx.
well, my theory on that, is that certain ethnic groups are more worried about Trump than others, and believing the electability meme.
Certain ethic groups hate white people.
Is it hard to type with that hood on?
It’s a complete mystery why Sanders attracts these types.
I simply cannot figure it out.
.
So, as I said, white people are not welcome anymore in the Democratic Party, asshole!
No, saying that entire ethnic groups hate white people isn’t welcome in the Democratic Party, you racist asshole.
Hillary will be shocked to learn this.
Why shocked. Romney won a majority of the white vote — both male and female.
I don’t know, Marie, probably because she’s about to become the leader of a party that doesn’t welcome white people.
And since she’s white, she’s probably going to wonder if she should just step down and let a welcome politician take her place.
Wait a minute. Hillary’s white?!
it depends on her audience, actually.
She is a shape-shifter extraordinaire!!!
AG
Yeah, but the Bronx doesn’t count because…you know.
And they were, of course, rolling in TARP money in the Deep South and Rust Belt.
Maybe you can explain this to:
Hillary won only 13 of the 62 counties in New York. She won very big majorities in 5 of the 6 wealthiest counties in the state:
New York (Manhattan), Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk, and Rockland, in that order.
But the biggest majority of all in the Bronx, poorest county in the state.
So what is all this talk of class conflict? Pshaw.
What am I supposed to explain?
There are many more people in those 13 than in the 49 Sanders won. Who cares about the number of counties?
As for wealthy vs poor — those counties all look to me as though they’re fairly urban relative to the counties Sanders won.
Thanks for that penetrating analysis.
Any time.
I can explain the Bronx for you, because I live there and I am in constant contact with many, many intelligent, highly perceptive Bronxites. I’ve seen the following up close and personal during a couple of Dem rallies at which I have been hired to play latin music. I watched Andrew Cuomo whip the audience up into a frenzy of self-seeking greed…something at which he is a master…after which the street workers went out and energetically proselytized for centrist pols like Cuomo and by extension HRC as well.
Bernie? Hell, most of the Dem voters inna Bronx don’t have a clue about who he is and what he’s saying, long term. They just want theirs now, with ice cream on top. It’s hard to blame them, really…hard to blame any ethnic group that finally finds a little power in numbers after two or three or four generations of being fucked from behind by the system.
The Democratic Party in the Bronx is centrist to a fault. Old-line Puerto Ricans, mostly, people who profited from the “centrist” (and often totally crooked), old-fashioned ward heeler politics that kept the Bronx blue for 50 or 60 years. Read up on a couple of snapshots of the rampant political criminality here and here if you so wish. Bottom line? Most of the Dem voters in the Bronx are remnants and beneficiaries of a old-style urban political machine. Of course Hillary won. She is part of the logical culmination of such a system. The further up the ladder of a system like this one climbs, the more the payoffs rise while simultaneously the less prosecutions succeed.
‘Hits the ‘Murican way!!!
AG
In the late ’80s I taught in a junior high in the South Bronx for a year. That was enough.
I saw plenty of what you’re talking about.
The reason it was only a year is that they got rid of the principle that hired me and they didn’t want me either. The whole thing was run on patronage.
You write:
“The whole thing” is still run on patronage. And I mean the whole thing. Up and down the system, from da Bronx to all of NYC to all of NY State and the rest of the country right on up to Washington, DC.
Why did Hillary Clinton win in NY State? Why is she going to win the nomination? Because she is part of the patronage establishment. Why do so few national pols get busted? I laid it out above.
It could be said that the entire system of human government and society runs on one or another version of the patronage game, really.
Sound familiar?
It does to me. From the simplest tribal systems right on up through the greatest empires, cultures and organizations…that’s about it. Something is often said to the effect that “We select on merit, not through political patronage,” but on plentiful evidence, that is usually at least a partial lie. “You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours” is the real order of the day.
Always and everywhere.
All we can do is fight it, one step at a time.
Later…
AG
Well, yeah, it’s the way of the world. Except that there’s an ongoing fight against it too, which occasionally succeeds.
Also it’s worse in some fields than others. If you’re in a state or municipal bureaucracy like the Board of Ed, it’s intense.
But if you think it’s bad in this country, well it’s a lot worse in most other countries.
I believe that it is “worse” here. Worse because it’s better. Better camouflaged by the media and thus more efficiently run.
Some relatively crude hustler like Qaddaffi, Saddam Hussein or even Putin with a hand in every pocket and pie in the country? Easy to spot. Slick Wllie, his wife Hands-Off Hillary or their confederate, Teflon Obama?
Riiiiight…
AG
No, I don’t know. Why don’t you finish your sentence instead of trying to be cute.
The National Polling shows the race dead even. Which is an immense accomplishment.
But the national polling polls an open primary, and that is behind the difference between the state numbers and the national numbers.
And this is a problem. 48% of millennials, and 44% of Hispanics id as independent. And yet both groups are an indispensable part of any left of center movement.
So we face a catch 22: if these independents become Democrats I think the liberal/progressive left becomes large enough to take over the party. But the reaction to being shut out may drive them further from the party than they already started.
It has to be said that among the people I talk to the condescension that pundits/bloggers (in honesty that applies here) have treated Bernie supporters with isn’t helping.
For the 100th time: YES WE CAN FUCKING COUNT. WE ALL KNEW THIS IS A LONG SHOT. JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THE “I tried to tell you this wouldn’t work”. We did far better than you EVER dreamed, so the disabuse yourself of the idea that you have something unique to add.
People who write this shit have no idea the perception they create among Sanders supporters.
That Bernie was an independent who became a Democrat makes him pretty unique. He can talk to these groups, and if he speaks at the convention he will be in a position to help the Party.
Much will depend on whether the Sanders campaign can develop leadership capable of taking his message forward. Dean didn’t: but Dean’s message was far more limited. The usual names I hear mentioned aren’t nearly dynamic enough to build on the work that has been done. Already, though, Sanders people are running at the local level. I talked to a State Senate candidate in NH on Monday – a Sanders person through and through.
Yeah, this. The MESSAGE can continue to go forward, and it absolutely should.
Bernie’s campaign documented a constituency. One so big that it could outright replace the Democrats at a stroke? Nope. But it’s an issue-oriented constituency, and the issues are not exactly a secret. Go listen to basically any Bernie speech, that’s the message. It’s not the person, and for that reason the message can continue.
Bernie will too: we in Vermont are real proud of him. He can come home, having changed the world, and we’ll keep him in the Senate as an Independent as long as he wants to be there.
As a native Vermont I know one thing:
Vermont Senators don’t retire: they leave in a coffin.
Aiken. Prouty. Jeffords. Leahy. Sanders.
Vermonters like their Senators. And they keep them there for a VERY long time.
Sigh.
So DKOS is kind of dead to me. But Caucus99 is doing the full PUMA this morning too. I like a lot of the people there: but that ain’t me.
I sent an e-mail this morning to a some people I know from the campaign about where they go to talk about politics. I got 3 invites to VERY active Facebook groups and a link to the Sanders reddit page.
“Why would you talk about politics on a blog” they responded.
I am old.
I agree with you on all points.
I have also tried to make the related point that by continuously telling people Sanders has no chance, the pundits/bloggers have had an effect on the outcome. I doubt people that come to a site like this changed their vote, but most voters are not political junkies.
Which is why I have a serious problem with BooMan’s protestations that he is a Sanders supporter, while simultaneously telling all of us Sanders has no chance. BooMan’s habit of making sure to point out how we were fools (or worse) for believing Sanders could win is just the type of attitude that may force some voters to stay home, consequences be damned.
If voters are presented with a choice between Clinton and Trump or any plausible GOP nominee and choose to not vote for Clinton, those voters will not have been driven to make their terrible choice by what pundits and bloggers said and wrote during the Party primary campaigns.
Not very many voters read political blogs or absorb themselves with the 24-hour news stations. They’re simply not controlled by these media outlets as you claim they are.
Wrong. For those who choose do to so, their treatment by pundits and bloggers will be one of the factors. If I came across as saying it was the only factor that was poor wording on my part. But it will have an impact.
For some people this primary season has been very personal and emotional. They have repeatedly been dismissed, belittled, and told to STFU; to let their betters take care of things. If you don’t think that will move people to stay home or vote for a different candidate you simply don’t live in the real world.
And your last sentence has no relevance to what I said. I never made any claims about the number of people who would be so inclined; I just stated some would be.
Do I think it will be enough to change the election? No idea. But the very fact that you responded the way you did just supports my point that several people who claim to be progressive/liberal love to talk down to people that find the current system broken and corrupt.
I’m sorry you’re taking the results of the primary so personally. I’m disappointed that Bernie will not gain the nomination, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to engage in behavior which lessens our movement’s ability to push Hillary leftward.
Believing that she’s the worst EVER and cannot be moved leftward or held against acting in response to what you and I agree would be her worst instincts (cough*no fly zone*cough) seems to me to be a betrayal of everythimg that Bernie wanted to accomplish, and in my view HAS accomplished, during his remarkable campaign.
Successful movements often take decades to achieve their goals. Do we have the guts to learn from our losses, recognize and pocket our successes, and play the long game? The radical right has done these things extremely effectively. They’re the obstacle in the way of our movement, not Hillary.
But, why?
There’s nothing remotely contradictory between the two parts of your sentence that I quoted above. Leaving your point without merit.
Likewise, this seriously (inexcusably, imo) mischaracterizes Booman’s statements:
By all means, feel free to prove me wrong by providing even one example of Booman having done that (noting bolded bit).
Still true: you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.
Facts, oaguabonita? You have no facts. You seem to always be demanding facts but you never seem to offer any to support what you say. Maybe all you have is an opinion (or should I say an asshole).
Seems like a fair request. This is actually sort of, y’know, provable. Has Boo called people “fools (or worse),” or has he not?
The onus isn’t on oag here.
Yes it is. If you present no facts, only opinions then automatically call other people’s opinions assholes, you get what you deserve.
So you’ve got nothing, basically.
or you’re really dishonest.
Given that I’ve already responded in detail (here and here) to this pathetic excuse for a “point” that you’ve latched onto (and clearly think is devastating enough to keep repeating, despite it being both already refuted AND idiotic! . . . which, now that I think about it, makes you pretty much the poster child for the common meaning of “internet troll”).
For the convenience of anyone who didn’t see that earlier exchange (and since you were apparently incapable of grasping it the first time), here’s the core of that response again:
And now you have it again.
All of which renders this either astonishingly dumb or a bald-faced lie:
The record is irrefutable that I’ve never done any such thing (as previously explained, and then repeated above).
“Without data, it’s just your opinion. Opinions are like assholes…”
If you want to add something as offensive as that statement automatically to every one of your posts while proceeding give no data, only opinion, the conclusion from your own words is obvious. There is no problem with your other opinions because this is the place for that. The problem is only with your opinion of opinions applied to everyone else but you.
This is always a problem with people living in glass houses who insist on throwing rocks. Consider this a short tutorial on manners.
Either you can’t or you refuse to follow a perfectly clear, plain, and valid explanation correcting your misunderstanding/misreading. Your problem, not mine.
But hey, what an honor to own my very own personal troll!
Normally I would suggest not feeding them. But on this site they go off to the right and feed themselves and then come out in waves.
.
You’ve make a bad assumption on my issue with his statement, which makes your point lacking merit. I’m not saying I had an issue because it was contradictory. I have an issue with his approach because I think it is defeatist and self-fulfilling.
Really? Do you not read his posts or the comments? The smugness, the dismissive of those who feel/felt Sanders had a chance is pretty clear:
“Check your petulance, fladem.
Getting even in the national polls and a nickel will buy you what, exactly?”
“jesus, shall I call a wahmbulance for you?”
“Sanders’ consigliere, Jeff Weaver”
“It troubles me that so many progressives got their hopes up and are now feeling despondent or worse”
Of course you are free to put your own spin to each item, but to me his main posts and responses at times have brought to mind what I posted.
Sorry, I’m not seeing any facts from you. Just opinions.
Where did he call you “fools (or worse)”?
I like how you placed quotation marks around that part of my post even though I never did. If I had wanted to claim he specifically said that I would have placed quotation marks around the original, but I didn’t.
Therefore, please see my previous response.
So give me an example that qualifies under your “(or worse)” bit.
Or are you just going to deflect and pretend you didn’t say it like a coward?
I’ve already given examples and directed you to them.
I think there is nothing more to discuss on this matter as you have resorted to name calling.
he’s quoting YOU, verbatim.
Can I get a “duh!”?
now you seem to have shifted (or at least clarified) the argument you intended to make.
(As originally laid out, I think it did imply there was some contradiction between the statements I pointed out were in fact not contradictory. I’d call that an inference, not an assumption, but the distinction, at least in this context, hardly seems worth quibbling over. At any rate, I’m not interested in doing so.)
With this clarification, it now seems you object to booman’s choice to provide his analysis of how he sees things most likely to go, independently of how he’d prefer them to go.
Well, ok. That’s your right. Because I find booman’s analyses valuable (even on occasions when I either DON’T agree with them, or would prefer things NOT go that way), I don’t share that objection, but you have every right to express it.
You should try looking at the following results from two different perspectives. One is simple racial diversity and the other is cultural liberalism. You can also look at wealth if you want, although that’s a more mixed picture.
The Bronx: 70-30
Manhattan: 66-34
Queens: 62-38
Brooklyn: 60-40
Staten Island: 53-47
Staten Island is not the poorest borough, but it’s the least diverse and the least culturally liberal. It’s where Sanders did best in
South CarolinaNew York City.The poorest and most diverse borough is The Bronx, where Sanders did the worst.
Brooklyn has the most white ethnic enclaves, but Queens has plenty too. Brooklyn is also Sanders home turf.
Manhattan is the most culturally liberal, although it’s also the wealthiest and most Wall Streety.
There are a mix of factors in each place, but the results are inescapable that the more liberal the borough, the better Clinton did. And the more diverse, the better she did. The beating progressive heart of
South Carolinaoverwhelmingly supported Clinton.And, as I’ve said, this is the kind of result that was already showing in the 83% approval numbers for Clinton among self-described progressives in 2014.
Progressives like her a lot, which is hard to see if you spend all day on blogs. Even I forget it sometimes. But this was at the heart of my analysis from the beginning.
Yea – this gets destroyed by the exit poll.
Very Liberal: 28% Sanders 59, Clinton 41
Somewhat Liberal: 38% Clinton 57 Sanders 43
Moderate 29%: Clinton 66 Sanders 34
The data is clear and not subject to argument: the more liberal the voter the better he did.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/19/us/elections/new-york-primary-democratic-exit-polls.ht
ml
It’s funny to see people draw conclusions without bothering to check the data.
Because the data shows precisely the opposite result from the one you just made. You would have to dive into the precincts in these places to fully understand it which county results don’t let you do.
But yours is a classic mistake: starting with a generalization about an electorate and drawing a conclusion without reference to an understanding based on a more granular understanding of the electorate.
Thank you for the link to the exit polls.
And that forces us to ask some hard questions.
For example, what’s the distinction between how people describe themselves and how they actually feel about the issues?
What happens when you ask people if they’re progressive vs. if they’re liberal?
When Sanders dominates with people with no religion, is that a coded way of saying he dominates with white “very liberals”?
Do religious blacks and Latinos shy away from the liberal label but not the progressive label?
I don’t mean to quibble with the plain results you’re citing, which speak for themselves in a way. But they do raise interesting questions, like why did Sanders do so well in Staten Island where the “very liberal” vote is (or should be) quite low, and certainly lower than any other borough?
If you look at the Exits on religion and ideology, he should have gotten killed in Staten Island and done best in Manhattan. That did not happen.
Instead, the racial component comes to the fore as a strong indicator, and that’s where we run into the problem of blacks and Latinos making up the bulk of progressive politicians in this country but not calling themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.”
Finally, it’s not a surprise that Sanders does best with “very liberal” voters, but the question is whether that contingent was ever going to be sufficiently opposed to Clinton to carry the day.
Progressives (whether they call themselves that or not) need to be united to have a hope of prevailing, and I don’t think even white progressives are united. Sanders is getting maybe 40% if I’m being generous of what he’d need.
He’s need even more if he wasn’t doing well in rural places and with subset of Archie Bunkers who can’t get with Trump. So, he got a lot of votes out of the ethnic white neighborhoods of New York City last night, and these folks were the “moderates” by most people’s reckoning. Who knows how they actually described themselves. Probably depends on whether they’re in a union household or not.
re: the AA vote, AA voters are necessarily very very pragmatic. As I mentioned, a friend who is highly versed in Northern NJ politics was worried about Trump’s candidacy a year ago, when i was paying it no mind. in addition to the DNC and party matters, I think it’s about electability not about appeal of the candidate; same thing you observed with Obama in 08.
I agree, but my question is about how the black and Latino communities answer the ideology question in the exit polls, and I suspect that their religiosity is causing them to align as moderates or slightly liberal rather than very liberal.
It’s just one guess among a few that might explain why Sanders got the votes in Staten Island when the exits said that he was doing best with atheists and very liberal folks.
Staten Island is filled with cops and firefighters and other white working class folks who formed the backbone of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. Now they’re rejecting her, even those the exits said that “moderates” were her strongest supporters.
Obviously, the exits and the results only match up if the way people self-report ideology is different from what we’d expect.
I have said before that Texas Hispanics are mostly bidness Dems. I have no idea how they self-identify…probably as progressives. Go further West and they get a lot more liberal, imo.
I have the same problem with progressive that you have with neoliberal. It is even less defined, imo. It has been cut from its historical roots and is just waving around out there.
We kind of agree on something!
LOL
Worth a full discussion in a diary. We are a large faction of the electorate and always end up with a name that is reactive instead of proactive. I always identified myself as a liberal, but that word has been trashed by the GOP and Democrats. Leftie reduces one to a single scale from right to left. Progressive was useful a hundred years ago but isn’t properly descriptive today.
They do raise interesting question. They have little to do with the initial analysis you presented, which was incorrect on its face.
What you conflate is geography with ideology. I was a very liberal guy for years in a very conservative part of the I-4 corridor.
My ideology mattered, not my geography. That there would be very liberal people on Staten island is hardly surprising. Xeoncrypt could answer all of this in an hour. It may be that white democrats are more likely in New York than elsewhere to identify as being liberal.
So White Democrat in NYC = liberal.
This piece from Matt Yglesias is pretty interesting. Because he does what pundits do all the time: they make a statement, and then cite data that show the complete opposite. He wrote:
“think that what this pretty clearly shows is that ideological self-identification surveys are not very useful. By any objective measure African-Americans are the most left-wing racial group in America. “
But the poll shows African Americans are only marginally more liberal than Whites (24% versus 20%). 29% self ID as conservative, which implies since most African Americans are Democrats that a significant percent of conservative Democrats are African American. I would infer from the poll date presented that in fact one could conclude African American Democrats are in fact more likely than White Democrats are to be conservative.
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/02/04/196046/are-african-americans-conservative-or-is-ideolog
ical-self-identification-meaningless/
And more that half the time, they are discussing the SOCIAL spectrum. Nobody even thinks it is about economic liberals, or whatevers.
Yea – this is where it gets complicated. African Americans are less supportive of gay rights than Whites are: according to Pew 58% of whites supported gay marriage in 2015 and only 37% of African Americans did. In fact, protestant African Americans were far closer in their support for gay marriage than whites were, and more than 20% less likely to support gay marriage than white mainline protestants.
So my guess religion and social issues drive African American ideology to a large extent.
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/07/29/graphics-slideshow-changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
I’m not interested in defending Yglesias, but if you know one single thing about Staten Island, you know that no one wins or does well there by winning the vote of the few liberals that live there.
You’re not even trying to explain why Sanders did best in the most self-evidently non-liberal part of town. It’s also the most observant Christian part of town. And, I would expect, the most self-identified moderate part of town.
So, the exits completely contradict the actual results, not only because he did best in the area where the people were collectively least aligned with him (according to the exits) but because he did very badly in the areas where the exits suggested he would do quite well.
Looking at it on a more granular level, I can see neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn where he did well that I would expect him to do well, but overall the exits do not match up.
So, either the exits are off or there’s some weirdness in how people self-report their ideology. And I suspect the latter explanation, combined with a simple racial component, explain the difference.
But, again, then we’re reduced to arguing over whether blacks and Latinos are really progressives or liberals, or whatever.
I say they are. Maybe they don’t tend to say that.
Because you don’t know the percentage of the Staten Island DEMOCRATIC electorate that is liberal.
You aren’t granular enough to say one way or another. Its like saying because the South is more conservative, Southern Democrats are more conservative. But that is a gross over simplification.
I put significant stock in what people say there are. Having lived in Manhattan I am well aware that liberal is in some ways a tribal affiliation (my wife, a Brooklyn Jew, says she is a liberal reflexively). I think it is fair to say that in New York it is more defined by social issues (gay rights, etc) than by class. It may be Bernie is able to align himself with class based resentment in Staten Island in a way Clinton cannot.
There are similarities in Teachout’s profile and Sanders profile in NY. Teachout got 39% outside New York 28% in New York. Like Sanders, she was demolished in the Bronx, did marginally better in Brooklyn, and the profile looks roughly the same in Queens. There are two outliers I see in NYC:
Teachout’s best county was Manhattan. She did about the same in Staten Island in the rest of the city, though she did better there than in the Bronx.
By contrast in relative terms Bernie did much better in Brooklyn and Queens, but significantly worse in Manhattan. Conversely Sanders outperformed in Staten Island where Teachout did about the same as the rest of the city.
So:
As compared to Teachout, Bernie did not do as well in Manhattan in relative terms as Teachout, he outperformed in Staten Island while Teachout was about average.
I started by saying Bernie did better the more liberal the voter, that is undeniable. We don’t have cross-tabs, but it sure as hell looks like from the data in the Bronx that you can infer that the people of color are less likely to ID as liberal. This is consistent with the 2014 governor primary, and suggests a white liberal candidacy has trouble connecting with Minorities in NY. This experience is similar to that of Bernie in the South, and suggests an enduring problem (but hell this was true in the 72 primaries between McGovern and Humphrey. This ain’t new)
It also suggests what I have longer believe: Barack Obama was a unicorn.
That is about the end of where my understanding of the data takesme.
There are no liberals. There are union workers, who are part of the progressive movement, at least at the leadership level. Some of them are basically Archie Bunker socialists/communists, but they’re not classic white intellectuals will bachelor’s degrees or doofus hipsters.
Here’s an analysis by Staten Islanders.
If NYC is so progressive, how is it that a Republican has been elected mayor in five of the last six elections? Statewide there are more registered DEM than GOP. Add the 2.3 million unaffiliated to the GOP column (a possible but probably ludicrous scenario) and there’s still more DEM registrations.
Or maybe we should compare ’08 and ’16 NYC results. And recognize the different variables in play in those two primaries. ’08 was status because even during the campaign the policy differences were practically negligible with the single exception that Obama didn’t support the IWR (but he also had the luxury of not having had to cast a vote on it either) and at best, the progressive DEM base split 50/50% in NYC (the split in favor of Obama was much larger in other parts of the country). ’16 was an opportunity to weigh in on economic policy differences which are significant as well as one more time on the IWR (which also falls within the broad category of progressive).
The Bronx: 60-38 — 70-30
Manhattan: 54-44 — 66-34
Queens: 60-38 — 62-38
Brooklyn: 50-48 — 60-40
Staten Island: 60-36 — 53-47
For fun add in:
Suffolk: 62-35 — 55-45
Nassau: 62-35 — 63-37
Westchester: 52-44 — 67-33
Interpreting those results doesn’t seem difficult to me.
Bloomberg isn’t really a Republican, which I hope you realize.
Dinkins did not do a good job as mayor and Giuliani was a very effective politician for a long time before his personal failings got the better of him and became way too obvious for people to ignore.
But, look, if you’re going to argue that NYC isn’t progressive or liberal, then you’re left with San Francisco, Portland, and some college towns.
I suppose Los Angeles and Seattle fell into the ocean?
There are some I’m missing as well, but to miss these two cities is really sad.
I’ve lived in L.A. and it isn’t as liberal as NYC. Seattle, I’ll grant you.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree on L.A. I actually find it more liberal.
And Hillary isn’t really a Democrat. Both are economic royalists, nannies, tough on crime, pro-war, etc.
Liberal areas elect Republicans all the time. Hell in 2014 nearly won the Vermont Governorship.
The ’08 comparison is interesting, but it was a different race. In ’08 NY was part of Super Tuesday, and as a result just one of a number of states. This time NY had 2 weeks to itself, and I suspect the electorates were different.
But then, I haven’t looked at the data.
I am really curious what the next open Democratic primary is going to be like. There’s no obvious next-in-line candidate, and Sanders has shown that, in the age of social media, a leftist candidate can raise an astounding amount of money. Will there be six Bernies running in 2024?
Maybe even in 2020.
If the left stays out there educating citizens, and the next four yrs are as I expect, I think there will be another serious challenge from the left in four yrs.
Not to mention from the right, if economic conditions worsen much.
The 1099ers will be even larger and more desperate.
I am pretty sure the GOP will win in 2020 but otherwise no idea. I would like to work to maintain the attention presidential campaigns brought to these issues. I agree educating the public is going to be very important. Getting them to listen maybe even more so.
I could see Juan or Julian Castro emerging. There are other young Democrats on the bench. They’ll emerge, just as Bill emerged in 1992.
Been a few shots across the bows of ship Castro. They are both bidness Dems. Now that the climate has been identified by Sanders, it is dead easy to pick out the methods…
At issue is the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, started in 2010 to allow mortgages going toward foreclosure to be sold to what HUD calls “qualified bidders and encourages them to work with borrowers to help bring the loan out of default.”
The progressives attacking Castro say they believe the mortgages should be sold instead to nonprofits and other institutions that would care more about the communities involved. What Castro’s done, they say, has essentially amounted to a fire sale for Wall Street firms.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/progressive-groups-target-julian-castro-221817#ixzz46NHP5dnT
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
Chelsea or Michelle.
I think that there was a definitive distaste for dynasties this year. I think it will persist. Especially if the inequality issue remains as strong as the status quo will likely keep it.
Only among the GOP and IND voters. That strain in political parties seems to be stronger in the DEM party than the GOP. GWB was an exception, but GHWB had only had one term and they couldn’t have rejected Jeb? more quickly and thoroughly than they did this time around.
The “left” needs to vote in off year elections. I’ll trade three protests and one march for an off year election that the left gets engaged in. When I start seeing that happen, that’s when I will believe that there’s a revolution.
It is where they should attack to primary some Dems and inject some fear.
Absolutely correct and I’ll believe it when I see it. Occupy was such a waste of energy and that’s sad because it could have accomplished at least something important if it could have articulated something more than churlish anger.
Occupy Wall Street was not a waste of effort. Without it, Sanders likely would not have decided that the time was right to begin his campaign nor would inequality be on the agenda.
Occupy Wall Street was shut down in a multi-city DHS-sponsored operation at exactly the point that it was building alliances with labor unions in New York. The first Brooklyn Bridge protest march with labor was what triggered mayors to begin talking about the “threat” of Occupy Wall Street. The second 75,000-person Brooklyn Bridge protest came right before the attack on the Occupy Wall Street tent city at Zucotti Park with militarized police, garbage trucks, and workers in HazMat suits–a clear bit of “health and safety” theater to justify the repression of an otherwise peaceful, if disruptive, assembly of people who were advocating something the powers that be could not tolerate becoming a widespread sentiment.
That Democrats, much less progressives, did not take the trouble to understand what was going on with Occupy Wall Street shows the same failures as the Democrats who in the 1960s did not understand what was going on with the civil rights and anti-war movements.
The current options the establishment offers are co-option or repression on establishment terms. Grand bargain anyone? It’s still being discussed in Democratic circles.
What BooMan suggests Sanders do — get as many delegates as he can so as to take a census of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is a good inside strategy. The convention will clarify whether progressives are welcome any more in the party of FDR and LBJ. And whether peace, prosperity, and progress any more are on the agenda for the US’s two major parties or whether we resign ourselves to war, austerity, and stagnation because it is pragmatic.
At what point does history record that triangulation wasn’t a pragmatic response to attack but a deliberate act of corruption and betrayal. The hippie punching is where your churlish anger is.
Whatever else Occupy Wall Street was, it was NOT a political movement. It had zero political organization, very little organization at all, in fact.
Occupy Wall Street was and still is a movement. It just had to wait a while for Bernie to give it political organization. Without the existence of this movement, Bernie would never have tried. I think it’s ironic that the Democratic Party is so out of touch that it took an Occupy Wall Street movement to remind us of our FDR New Deal roots.
It was very much a political movement. What it was not was an electoral politics political movement. The Moral Monday movement is still very much a political movement; it is an electoral politics movement; it is not a partisan electoral politics movement; it will endorse both Republicans and Democrats who move its agenda forward. Unlike Human Rights Campaign, I don’t think it will give candidates a pass just to have a visible Republican.
And in fact there are bunches of Occupy Wall Street veterans also working on the Sanders campaign as individuals. Likely some also are working on the Clinton campaign as individuals.
Also the Democracy Spring movement carries on some of the agendas of Occupy Wall Street and encounters the same response from police forces.
Electoral politics is not the only form of political action, and often the least productive.
I take your point, and I wasn’t trying to be dismissive. I just meant that at the time, they didn’t appear to have any tangible policy goals or organization, other than to get Main Street to think about Wall Street, and in that they were certainly successful. It’s only right that there should be some de facto continuity between OWS and Bernie.
It’s a little harder for me to get my head around the idea that some are now in the Clinton camp.
Speaking of Democracy Springs, this is going on…
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/04/16/hundreds-democracy-spring-protesters-arrested
-dc/83123326/
When the left can put up its own candidates to vote for in primaries and expect party support in the general election when their candidates win (cough, Ned Lamont), that might be a realistic strategy.
But as you say, it would be worthwhile to get voters out for Democrats.
Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, the demographics that did not turn out in mid-term elections go beyond the “left” and “progressives”. And state parties either were sabotaged or dealt in self-defeating tactics. It seems that the NC Dems “we are watching you” letters were sent out over Patsy Keever’s signature without her knowledge. Someone in the NC Democratic Party campaign staff or consultants did that. No one is telling who.
Nonetheless the story keeps getting repeated that the left and progressives cost Democrats in 2010 and 2014. Why is that the story that is persistent when it was the Blue Dogs who lost in Blue Dog territory? The centrists have been working to suppress progressives longer than progressives have been aware of what was going on. After fourteen years of trying to get more and better Democrats, the Democratic Party is at a crossroads. And so is the country.
Math is just a bunch of lies The EstablishmentTM uses to cheat Bernie when more people vote for Hillary than him, Boo. How much did DWS pay you for this post?
I’m more interested in the Hillary supporters than the Bernie supporters. (And why not? There are clearly more of them – as the Hillary supporters like to point out.)
This was roughly the point in 2008’s electoral fortunes when Obama woke up one morning and decided: hey, you know what, I was totally wrong about opposing immunity for telecoms for their connivance in Bush’s domestic spying! Now I think it’s a great idea!
Hillary, lacking Obama’s charm, will need to be a little less blatant about such things. When she begins to rediscover the merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership – their having been temporarily obscured while Sanders was still within striking distance – she will carefully explain that it’s not a reversal. Just a “re-evaluation”.
And then what will the Hillary supporters say? I think they will say that she is merely pretending to be a moderate so that she can defeat the Awful Republican and, once elected, do all the wonderful liberal things for us that she really believes in.
And after she wins and bombs her first Muslim country – exercising the “smart power at its best” whose delightful results in Libya fill her with such pride? What will the Hillary supporters say then? I think they will say that she is not a lover of wars, despite her unfailing support for them, and that the corpses of women and children are truly regrettable. But that the American presidency is a difficult job requiring difficult choices. And Hillary can’t afford to squander precious politicial capital by appearing weak in the face of our enemies.
In summary: I think they will continue making the same threadbare excuses for her as they did for her predecessor – their tribal loyalty to the Party unshaken. And I think Hillary will deliver them four more years of what they have demonstrated they will accept: endless war, domestic surveillance, and protection for the kleptocracy.
Make sure you stay home in November so you can maintain your purity.
Hey you’re pretty good with the gratuitous insults. It’s getting to be quite the thing here lately.
So now it’s an insult to tell someone who knows that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between B̶u̶s̶h̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶G̶o̶r̶e̶ Trump and Clinton to stay home in November so that they don’t have to dirty up their pure hearts by voting for the…equal evil?
It’s a good thing that Sanders didn’t win the nomination, because if you think what I said was an insult, boy would y’all be shitting your breeches with what Strongman Trump is going to be dishing out.
Sorry, I must have missed the part about Trump. Maybe that’s because he didn’t say anything about Trump.
And speaking of Strongman Trump, if he were a commenter here I would have said a lot worse things to him than I said to you.
it’s strange: lots of complaints about Sanders supporters, somehow insulting them/ us and misunderstanding our comments (exaggerating, extrapolating and ridiculing) gets a free pass:
Go ahead, Beahmont, give me a 1; you seem to have missed a few of my comments btw
I apologize for not being as well-informed as some folks here. Just a Democratic party observer of people. But as I recall, Obama was, for instance, against gay marriage. Maybe “civil unions” were OK. Over time, because of pressure from liberals, he “evolved” and now it’s the law of the land.
My point is that there is a huge underestimation of the power of the left to move a centrist closer to their position. The folks who support Bernie should be proud that they have opened up the narrative. The issue is that they believe in absolutism from the candidate, not the populace. You have work to do to convince other regular voting folk to move in your direction. Free education, single payer, break up the banks — these seem like extreme positions to a centrist like me. Not unworthy goals over time, but unachievable goals at this time in this country and not impossible in the future.
The outcome of these goals depends not on the candidate but on you. Stay organized. Find effective ways to argue your case. And you have good arguments. You just haven’t persuaded enough folks yet. Demonizing centrists isn’t the way to do it. Threatening delegates isn’t the way to do it.
I remind you that the country as a whole is a centrist country, but it can be moved leftward. For some that’s a big leap. Join in the party, become a strong voice, stay engaged, find the issues that motivate you and make a difference.
And find good liberal candidates and put them forward in primaries. Even if they lose they put fear in incumbents. Basic politics. The base of the republicans showed the way, now even in the senate they are so scared the won’t vote for an empty Supreme Court seat!
But will they? No.
It would betray the cause.
.
OT:
Anyone from PA got the 4-1-1 on this guy?
……………………
A Member of “Bernie’s Army” Is Still Waiting for the Candidate’s Help
John Fetterman is running for Senate in Pennsylvania, one of the most expensive races in the country. He wants to know when the political revolution starts.
By Michelle Goldberg
John Fetterman, the populist mayor and long-shot Democratic Senate candidate, was one of the first elected officials in the country to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. He is, like Sanders, a political outsider. A tattooed giant–6-foot-8, more than 300 pounds–he’s spent the past 11 years presiding over Braddock, Pennsylvania, a largely black town outside Pittsburgh that was wrecked by the collapse of the local steel industry. Income inequality is at the center of his campaign. “I think there’s a great deal of overlap” between Sanders’ platform and his own, he tells me, “whether it’s a $15-an-hour living wage or health care, trade deals, a rigged economy.” Ideologically, the only real difference between the two men is that Fetterman is more in favor of gun control. He has the date of every homicide in Braddock since his election–nine in all–inked on his right arm.
……………………
Given the money and political power stacked against him, Fetterman says he needs Sanders’ help to have any chance next Tuesday, the same day as the Pennsylvania presidential primary. So far, however, it has not been forthcoming. There’s been no endorsement, no fundraising support, no joint appearances. Fetterman’s campaign finds this confounding. On the ground, he says, there’s enormous overlap between his supporters and the Sanders grassroots. (“The crowd at the Fishtown brewpub is young, liberal, urban. They rave about Sanders–and Fetterman,” says a recent Philadelphia Inquirer story.) In a three-way race, he believes, Sanders’ backing could be decisive; Fetterman estimates that he’ll win if he gets 60 or 70 percent of Sanders’ voters.
Er, he is helping to split the progressive vote so that the conservadem will get elected. The one who loves fracking–even public spaces. Expect that to become a feature of Dem primaries if progressives manage to count coup a few times.
Fetterman would be the perfect guy for Sanders to back, but it’s way too late now. He should have done it months ago.
Did you not even bother to research this guy before commenting? Sanders should have nothing to do with him. His views ready like a DNC centrist trying to woo progressives.
Like what? People I respect have all said that if they were in PA they’d vote for him
In general I just didn’t get the sense he wanted to really challenge anything. I’m not saying he didn’t want to make positive improvements, but they all appeared to be within the current framework. For example, his view on fracking is to make sure it’s regulated. He seems to have given up on even trying to get rid of it. The fact that NY has banned fracking means it can be done. It just takes work. And considering the damage it has done to PA, that’s scary.
I’m not saying he isn’t progressive for the area he was representing, but he really comes off as a nicer DNC centrist. I don’t believe Sanders should support any of the DNC centrist types.
I don’t get that impression at all, particularly when compared with the competition. But that’s not how coalitions work. If he’s the most progressive in the race, support him.
I don’t know if anything has gone on in the background in the MD race, but I wish Sanders came out in favor of Donna Edwards. Maybe he approached her and she said no because it’s right and Clinton is obviously favored, but I suspect he didn’t even approach.
Fair enough. But I will have to disagree on the coalitions part. Forming those type of coalitions has led us to the current situation. Maybe in this case it is not as extreme as it appears. But blindly following the formula of supporting “the most progressive” can lead to some of the awful Democrats that are in office today.
In my opinion, that strategy hasn’t worked, and we can no longer to afford to pursue it.
On the MD / Donna Edwards situation I have no idea. I would be nice if we could find out what happened behind the scenes.
I guess we will agree to disagree. Particularly so when all I’m trying to do is hold the barricades where they currently are until young people are in power. It’s obvious the current generation refuses to do what needs to be done, and pushing it ahead of the curve is the only thing to be done. That’s inside electoral politics, mind you. Read below that I find electoral politics to mostly be a fool’s errand anyway, and that all you should really commit to is voting for them in the primary and try and win, and then voting for them in the GE. Any more than that is generally a waste of time. I think volunteering for Sanders is less of a waste of time than normal because Clintonism is poisonous and this is a “any means necessary”. But for the most part leftist political energy is better spent outside of electioneering altogether.
Yes Martin, what a great mandate for Hillary.
New York has more voter restrictions than even North Carolina and Texas all designed to protect the Establishment. Great victory for you.
“The state has no early voting, no Election Day registration and excuse-only absentee balloting. The voter registration deadline for the primary closed 25 days ago, before any candidate had even campaigned in New York. Meanwhile, independent or unaffiliated voters had to change their party registrations back in October — over 190 days ago — to vote in today’s closed Democratic or Republican primaries. Meanwhile, WNYC is reporting there are 60,000 fewer registered Democrats in Brooklyn and no clear reason why.”
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35700-millions-of-new-yorkers-disenfranchised-from-primaries-than
ks-to-state-s-restrictive-voting-laws
What’s the balance between too restrictive and too loose? Should Republicans be allowed to vote in Dem primaries? Should people who aren’t quite 18? How about you get to vote the day after rather than the day before? C’mon. No one should be surprised by the rules. And ask yourself, if Bernie had won this one, would you be complaining?
Who wins does not change the concept or importance of fairness. Enjoy your win, that is, until you face a President Trump.
that’s my fear
Seriously, I’ll ask again. What is fair? Why is it fair that people who shun choosing a party or working for a party, get to vote in a party primary? That’s what general elections are for.
As was pointed out yesterday by Booman, if you want to have a say in the Democratic Party, then join it and have your say. Get engaged. Build a coalition.
Bernie has been an outsider. He has always been an Independent and has chosen that path deliberately. Now he wants Independents to be the decisive factor in choosing him to be the Democrats’ standard bearer. I just don’t get how that computes. He could have run as an Independent. But once he came over to the Democrats and decided to use their system, he has to play within those rules. Instead, he’s complaining about the rules he explicitly agreed to play by.
Maybe parties should start paying for their own primaries then?
Taxes paying for country club primaries are collected from eligible/not registered and registered/not affiliated voters–in most places they outnumber the registered members by wide margins.
Is a lot of ticket splitting with strategic voters, too, in one-party states.
The Democratic Party pays for the Iowa caucuses. I haven’t looked into how many other states that applies to, but party also pays for all its county and state conventions where the delegates are actually selected in many states.
States with a primary system often time the election to coincide with local or state elections that are occurring anyway. That’s the case here in Pennsylvania, where we’re also voting for U.S. Senate and other down ballot races.
Sometimes states split it into two elections, one of which is only the primary, but that’s done by the state legislature and probably to increase their influence by having an earlier primary.
I don’t have a problem with parties paying for their primaries. The only problem here is that other parties besides Dem and Rep would have a hard time coming up with the money. Indies, Greens, People’s Working Party, etc. Too much to front all that. So, like all else in USA, all taxpayers pay for things they don’t like (bombs, drones, BLM, environmental regs, etc.).
The question yesterday was about reforming the primary system. One way would be public financing and a common set of rules. What “everyman” has learned this election is that the process is based on a 2 party system and the rules favor maintaining that. If people opt to eschew the parties, then they have opted not to participate. That’s the risk.
Where I live the primaries in local elections dictate the outcome in the general because it is so heavily skewed Democratic. So people register as Democrats even though they might prefer to be something else, just to have a say in local government. I’m sure in many places this cuts the other way too. So being an independent is a self-choice to remove yourself from the decision-making. It’s a willing choice to allow others to choose for you. To decide this week that this is an unfair system is “this election” specific.
Maybe the answer is a non-denominational primary that is run by state civil servants and partisan observers. Open to all and ballot splitting permissible as in the general. But only one vote per office slot.
This similar to the jungle primaries in California. It can be gamed, but voter eligibility is not an issue.
Not a bad option. It would move the elected officials to the center. But still, who would pay for it?
The future is youth. They’ve told the parties to shove off. Independents are on the rise. You might want to ask why that is.
I see no reason to disallow independents, especially if you disallow same day registration. If I was in MS and wanted to vote for Thad Cochran to protect me from someone who was even farther to the right with no interest in te state, why shouldn’t those same voters be allowed to vote in the Dem primary for president? What if my employer is particularly right wing and checks party registration — something that’s a matter of public record?
Te fundamental difference here, I suspect, is that the party is a means to an end.
I think independents are on the rise because people have bought into “they’re both the same”. For me this is patently not true. To choose Independent is to remove yourself from the process until the November election. It’s a kind of abnegation of responsibility.
Sounds like whining to me. Look, if you want to stomp your feet that people my age aren’t coming into the party (I’m not registered one way or another, mostly because VA doesn’t force me), that’s on you.
Like unions who want to grow their union, they go where the workers are. For parties, they should go where the voters are. And right now, the young people don’t like what they see.
Not whining at all. To me, just pointing out the obvious. But I agree with you that finding ways to engage young voters would be great. Going to them is fine. But what is going to be effective in maintaining their attention span? This governing stuff is work. It involves a commitment over time. Young people will soon be busy with school, love, jobs, raising families, etc. Remember the young people who were enthralled with Obama in 2008? They didn’t much get organized unless there was a specific issue (eg. gay rights)that motivated them. Perhaps Keystone as a symbolic effort. Occupy Wall Street also for a bit. Staying outside the system and taking pot-shots just isn’t really effective, in my opinion. But it’s the appeal of Bernie Sanders for independents. It’s what he has done his whole career. You get to be right on the issues without having to deal with the reality of governing which is (as I said) difficult and complex.
wow. you sound like DWS talking to young women. btw, you’re just proving seabe’s point
I wish I knew what you meant. You talk as if young people are monolithic and what does “going to them” even mean? Shouting about injustice without a plan to address it? Numbers that don’t add up? It’s fine to be outraged at how things stand in the world. But my point is that if you want to do something about it, it takes commitment, dedication, clarity of purpose, working the system (most often). People who do that succeed. The ones who don’t, just frustrate themselves.
Do you know what it takes to get a bill through a legislature? It’s a tough go that can take decades to make a small improvement in people’s lives. And then a lot of luck, too. Someone has to bring the purpose, the personal stories, the need, together until legislators can’t do anything but pass a bill. My only comment is: get busy doing that work. Most voters want it done for them by someone else.
My old adage: If you think someone should change the system, remember that you are someone.
Sanders has figured out how to reach them. I’d say at the very least, “going to them” means allowing independents to vote in primaries, to which you’ve already expressed your opposition.
Steve M highlights that point through tweets from Robert Cruickshank. I suggest you listen:
“How is this good: “I live in NY and would like to register as a Dem to vote in your primary today.” “Hah! You’re 6 months too late! Moron.””
~Cruickshank
Link
It’s extremely effective if you ask me. Voting serves one purpose to me: get people in office who can be successfully be pressured to do the right thing. electoral politics outside of this is a waste of time.
And the way we have it now, the party is an end in itself.
So we have a Democratic Party that gets captured by DLC/Bill/Hillary neoliberalism. Before we start arguing about neoliberalism, let’s define it for this discussion:
“Neoliberalism is famously associated with the economic policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States…policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.”
The shift to this type of `business friendly’ policy is the main reason so many people became Independent saying there was no longer any difference between the Democrats and Republican as they are all only interested in the corrupting influence of the money to feather their own nest. The Clinton’s in particular have managed to turn this into a cash cow including political power the Republicans could only dream of. The Democrats knew they would eventually get challenged on this so they rigged the system putting a great number of thumbs on the scale so they could never lose.
The plain and simple truth is that when the Democrats did the things above, no room was left for any progressives who happen to reject neoliberalism. The money injected into the Democratic Party by the DLC/Bill/Hillary neoliberal policy has so corrupted the Democratic Party the party became impossible to reform, the only real lesson to be learned from this exercise of joining in, having our say, getting engaged and building a coalition.
You might be able to cheat your way to victory but you will never get us to support DLC/Bill/Hillary neoliberalism ever again. There is simply no going back.
So next time we do join in, have our say, get engaged and build a coalition we do it out of the reach of the DNC and rigged Democratic Party rules. The next time we do it as a third party starting in 2018. We take your advice about the necessity of taking this to the general election. When we do that, it will be the same people here whining that a third party gives the elections to the Republicans, something they brought on themselves trying to protect their own corruption.
I am a New York voter and a Bernie supporter, and I thought the NY voting laws sucked long before Bernie ever showed up.
What Bloomberg says about this.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-19/new-york-s-flawed-primary
Is NY only 25% indie? Seems low.
Technically, it’s only 21%. The closed primary system significantly reduces the number of voters that don’t like either party.
NY voter registration as of 4/1/16:
DEM: 49.1%
GOP: 23.8%
CON: 1.4% (GOP too liberal for them)
GRE: 0.2%
WOR: 0.4%
IND: 4.0% (previously associated with Perot)
BLANK: 21%
well sure it’s low, because being Indie in NY is a real handicap.
Please. You are throwing up a lot of strawmen here. The voting laws in NY are some of the most restrictive in the country.
And these rules are in a “liberal” state?
If you are okay with this just because these are the rules…then I guess there is really nothing further to discuss.
There’s a lot of pissed off voters in New York right now, and I think there will be a lot of discussion as well as a push to make some changes. Anyway, the issue is in the spotlight now, which is the first step.
“Restrictive voting laws in NY are horribly unfair, but caucuses are great.”
“Superdelegates are the devil, unless they overturn the will of the voters in favor of my candidate.”
“Other than nearly all of the swing states, Bernie wins the states that matter.”
“I’ll fight Wall Street.” Oh wait, that’s the other one. That’s okay.
It may soon be time to start coalition-building – identify a crop of “Bernie Democrats” running for office that his supporters might want to fund, etc. – build a tidal wave over time to enact policies dear to him and to move the party leftward.
Thats been my litmus this year. Ive asked local candidates for federal office if they support the Bernie agenda as an end goal, will vote for it if given the chance. Yes or no. And if they do, I can work to get them elected.
I can live with disagreements on how to get there but nothing Obama or HRC have done convinces me they want to. I’m done with that.
Robert Greene II, Jacobin: The South Still Has Something to Say
Don’t you think they will want to do it for themselves? It is too easy to discredit with purity tests for outsiders.